The 2025 Pinterest Marketing Best Practices Benchmark Report - Part 3
Research: Fresh Pins on Pinterest - What is "Fresh?"
Published March 27, 2025
Published March 27, 2025
In Part 3 of our study into over a million recent Pins on Pinterest, we’re looking specifically at new, Fresh Pins.
Understanding Fresh Pins is critically important to building a successful long-term Pinterest marketing strategy.
As we’ve seen already in Parts 1 and 2 of this study:
While the evergreen, viral nature of Pinterest presents a great opportunity for creators and marketers to build sustained, long-term success, it also raises a key challenge:
If Pin lifecycles are so long, how can I learn quickly enough from the success or failure of my new content?
To aid in better understanding and benchmarking Fresh Pins, we’ve set out to answer some key questions about how new content behaves on Pinterest:
Fresh Pins became an important concept on Pinterest back in 2019, as Pinterest began to shift how Pins were ranked in Pinners’ home feeds, search results and related Pin recommendations. A primary goal of this endeavor was to better balance the mix of tried and true “winning” content for specific topics vs brand new ideas that Pinners could bring into their real lives.
Prior to that time, many creators - bloggers specifically - had built Pinterest marketing strategies based on repinning the same exact content over and over again. As word got around that this strategy was effective at driving traffic from Pinterest, it ballooned in popularity.
However, a negative side effect of this practice was that Pinners increasingly saw the same exact content repeatedly across the site. It can be helpful to be reminded of an idea you were interested in every now and then, but after years of seeing the same content over and over, it can become frustrating.
“Fresh Pins” became the solution - and Pinterest began to rank new, fresh ideas more prominently.
Creators heard the message that creating new, Fresh Pins was key to getting traffic from Pinterest going forward. However, many disagreed on what would - or wouldn’t - constitute a “Fresh” Pin.
Over 5 years later, the definition of a Fresh Pin remains one of the most often debated and misunderstood concepts in Pinterest marketing.
With this part of our research, we hope to bring some real data into the conversation over a significant sample size of Pins (specifically: 1 million+ Pins from 17k+ accounts).
Let’s dive into the data, building on the 17 insights from parts 1 and 2:
The debate around the definition of a “Fresh” Pin often centers around what specific elements of the Pin need to be unique in order for it to be considered Fresh:
The data shows, that Freshness is truly a spectrum, not a binary “yes” or “no” determination.
Take the following two cuts of the data, looking at Pins that referenced URLs Pinned multiple times in the data set.
On the left, we show the average impressions of Pins using a new image but pointing to the same URL as prior Pins.
On the right, is average impressions of Pins using the same URL and image, but changing the text fields (i.e. Pin Title, description, alt text).
In NEITHER case does distribution immediately drop to zero.
In BOTH cases, distribution decays as the URL - or URL and image combination - is Pinned more times.
This shows that the algorithms behind the concept of Fresh Pins are not binary.
That is, they don’t simply say: Pin 1 is Fresh, show it. Pin 2 is not Fresh, don’t show it.
With that said, the rate of decay is clearly different in these two cases:
So, while Freshness is not a binary “yes” or “no” - various factors will impact how Fresh a Pin is - and thus how likely it is to gain significant distribution.
The fact that there is a decay doesn’t mean you should never create new Pins using the same image or the same URL as prior Pins.
There are very valid reasons to do these things, such as reframing the Pin for new audiences and corresponding search keywords.
Beyond that, the effort to create each additional Pin is far less than the effort required to create an entirely new page on your website. So, there is a realistic ROI equation at play for creators and marketers, who both need to drive the greatest impact possible from each minute they spend working.
However, as you think about an optimal Pinning strategy over time, you should try to maximize the overall Freshness of your Pins.
To help you construct your own Pinning strategy, we created this helpful guide to the levels of freshness for Fresh Pins, based on the data from this study.
.png)
Tailwind helps you create fresh Pins faster
Adopting a system like Tailwind can make it much quicker to generate fresher Pins more consistently, optimizing your long-term Pinterest strategy.
Here are a few key features that help you do just this:
New Fresh Pins build up their distribution over time, as Pinterest gathers signals about the quality of the new Pin before showing it to more and more users.
Over the first 90 days of fresh Pins’ life, we see a steady expansion of average distribution, albeit skewed by some outliers week to week.
The growth of distribution (impressions) for a Pin is highly correlated with the most prominent engagement actions, such as Saves and Outbound Clicks.
Or, to put it simply, engaging content earns more distribution with time.
Pins do NOT appear to be distributed immediately.
Brand new Fresh Pins mostly show no impressions within the first couple of days.
We believe this is likely because during this time Pinterest is analyzing the content, learning how to map it to ideas and interests on the platform, as well as processing various ranking signals to determine which Pins to show at all.
This is often a source of confusion or demotivation for creators:
“I posted but NOTHING happened!”
Have patience. Even after a week, we saw that ~20% of the Pins still hadn’t received any distribution yet.
However, if you want your Pins to start being seen faster, study the best practices from Part 2 of this research: 17 key findings about how to create viral Pins on Pinterest.
Following those guidelines will lead to Pins that Pinterest can understand, index quickly and begin showing to relevant audiences. Using highly relevant and trending keywords relative to the image and underlying page content is a key element for success.
Ok, so putting the pieces together: How can you benchmark Fresh Pin performance?
FIRST: Don’t judge content AT ALL on its week 1 performance - it may still be in the process of being mapped to the graph and indexed
NEXT: Look for steady gains in engagement metrics for Pins week over week for the first 2-3 months. Pins that show these gains will be the ones with a real chance of going viral long-term.
How much engagement is enough?
You may have noticed that we didn’t publish exact volume numbers on the chart in observation #19 above. This wasn’t a mistake - it’s intentional.
Publishing the exact number of Saves, Outbound Clicks or other engagement metrics we see Pins getting week over week is too dangerous. Spammers and bad actors would abuse this information to try to “hack” Pinterest. So, we’re not going to reveal the specific numbers.
The averages aren’t that important though. If you’re new to Pinterest, your averages will be much lower than more established creators - and vice versa.
The best comparison will be to your own prior performance.
If your Pins in February take off a bit faster than Pins from January, that’s a win. Now, try to beat it again in March. Continuing down that path will help you grow your performance, earn trust with Pinterest for your profile and your website domain, and build momentum with Pinners who come to love your content.
“Time is money” is an often overused phrase.
Yet, it’s this very concept that we often see marketers and creators not taking into account in creating their Pinning strategies.
Your time is valuable.
If you’re a creator or entrepreneur, every hour you spend creating Pins is an hour you’re NOT doing something else. That may be creating brand new content pages, or winning new sponsorship deals, checking in with an important client, or developing a new product line.
If you’re a marketer working for someone else, every hour you work costs the company some amount. But more importantly, spending that time on the right things - the most impactful workstreams - is a major factor in how much overall impact you’re able to drive,
Either way, the value of your time is often not just about how much you earn per hour - but the opportunity cost of what else you DIDN’T get done because of how you spent your precious time.
The way to unlock your maximum impact is to constantly push yourself to be more and more effective in where you focus your effort - and more and more efficient in how you complete tasks.
For most Pinterest marketers, this will mean creating Pins across the spectrum of freshness.
Entirely new URLs are time-intensive and expensive to create at high quality.
For each page or idea you have to market, you’ll want to figure out how to make as many high-quality new “Fresh Pins,” “Fresh Takes,” and even “Pretty Fresh” Pins as possible. This is the way to maximize your overall impact per hour of working time.
Why rethink that Canva process you’ve honed over the years?
Because Tailwind Create and SmartPin will help you create MORE Fresh Pins 5-10x faster, letting you move on to other valuable tasks sooner.
Why start using Tailwind Ghostwriter to help you plan and draft your new blog posts or articles?
Because you’ll break through writer's block sooner, get a solid draft in minutes, and spend 20-30 minutes editing your post to make it great instead of a day writing it from scratch.
Turning everything over to A.I. isn’t advisable - it’s just not good enough yet.
Fully A.I. generated content is often junk, and sometimes dangerous.
Beyond that, major platforms such as Pinterest and Google are already learning how to identify A.I. generated content - and are likely already beginning to penalize it.
It only takes a moment for an entire domain to be de-indexed or shadow-banned, and then all that work (and traffic) is lost.
However, there are smart, ethical, and effective ways you can start using A.I. in your marketing, while still creating high-quality, Fresh content - and ultimately adding even more value. We’ve highlighted some of those here, and look forward to continuing to explore the possibilities with you.
If you enjoyed this third installment of this research report, continue on to the final Part 4, where we’ll look at some account-level strategic considerations for successful marketing on Pinterest.
